Michel Menko was right. The beautiful Tzigana was awaiting him.
She stood at her window, like a spectre in her white dress, her hands
clutching the sill, and her eyes striving to pierce the darkness which
enveloped everything, and opened beneath her like a black gulf. With
heart oppressed with fear, she started at the least sound.
All she could see below in the garden were the branches defined against
the sky; a single star shining through the leaves of a poplar, like a
diamond in a woman’s tresses; and under the window the black stretch of
the lawn crossed by a band of a lighter shade, which was the sand of
the path. The only sound to be heard was the faint tinkle of the water
falling into the fountain.
Her glance, shifting as her thoughts, wandered vaguely over the trees,
the open spaces which seemed like masses of heavy clouds, and the sky
set with constellations. She listened with distended ears, and a shudder
shook her whole body as she heard suddenly the distant barking of a dog.
The dog perceived some one. Was it Menko?
No: the sound, a howling rather than a barking, came from a long
distance, from Sartrouville, beyond the Seine.
“It is not Duna or Bundas,” she murmured, “nor Ortog. What folly to
remain here at the window! Menko will not come. Heaven grant that he
does not come!”
And she sighed a happy sigh as if relieved of a terrible weight.
Suddenly, with a quick movement, she started violently back, as if some
frightful apparition had risen up before her.
Hoarse bayings, quite different from the distant barking of a moment
before, rent the air, and were repeated more and more violently below
there in the darkness. This time it was indeed the great Danish hounds
and the shaggy colossus of the Himalayas, which were precipitating
themselves upon some prey.
“Great God! He is there, then! He is there!” whispered Marsa, paralyzed
with horror.
There was something gruesome in the cries of the dogs, By the continued
repetition of the savage noises, sharp, irritated, frightful snarls and
yelps, Marsa divined some horrible struggle in the darkness, of a man
against the beasts. Then all her terror seemed to mount to her lips in a
cry of pity, which was instantly repressed. She steadied herself against
the window, striving, with all her strength, to reason herself into
calmness.
“It was his own wish,” she thought.
Did she not know, then, what she was doing when, wishing to place a
living guard between herself and danger, she had descended to the kennel
and unloosed the ferocious animals, which, recognizing her voice, had
bounded about her and licked her hands with many manifestations of joy?
She had ascended again to her chamber and extinguished the light, around
which fluttered the moths, beating the opal shade with their downy
wings; and, in the darkness, drinking in the night air at the open
window, she had waited, saying to herself that Michel Menko would not
come; but, if he did come, it was the will of fate that he should fall a
victim to the devoted dogs which guarded her.
Why should she pity him?
She hated him, this Michel. He had threatened her, and she had
defended herself, that was all. Ortog’s teeth were made for thieves
and intruders. No pity! No, no--no pity for such a coward, since he had
dared--
But yet, as the ferocious bayings of the dogs below became redoubled in
their fury, she imagined, in terror, a crunching of bones and a
tearing of flesh; and, as her imagination conjured up before her
Michel fighting, in hideous agony, against the bites of the dogs, she
shuddered; she was afraid, and again a stifled cry burst forth from her
lips. A sort of insanity took possession of her. She tried to cry out
for mercy as if the animals could hear her; she sought the door of her
chamber, groping along the wall with her hands outspread before her,
in order to descend the staircase and rush out into the garden; but her
limbs gave way beneath her, and she sank an inert mass upon the carpet
in an agony of fear and horror.
“My God! My God! It is a man they are devouring;” and her voice died
away in a smothered call for help.
Then she suddenly raised her head, as if moved by an electric shock.
There was no more noise! Nothing! The black night had all at once
returned to its great, mysterious silence. Marsa experienced a sensation
of seeing a pall stretched over a dead body. And in the darkness there
seemed to float large spots of blood.
“Ah! the unhappy man!” she faltered.
Then, again, the voices of the dogs broke forth, rapid, angry, still
frightfully threatening. The animals appeared now to be running, and
their bayings became more and more distant.
What had happened?
One would have said that they were dragging away their prey, tearing it
with hideous crimson fangs.